Acts of Nature mf-5

by Jonathon King

  "Is that a pistol in your pocket or did I just shoot you for trying to get a two-pound pack of cigarettes out of your jacket?" I said.

  "Fuck you, Freeman."

  The strain in his face increased. His breathing started to go ragged. He might have broken some ribs going down, possibly punctured a lung. But still his eyes were flashing left and right, trying to figure a move. Guy like him had probably saved his own ass a dozen times and was still confident he could do it again.

  I heard Sherry moan behind me, the first sound she'd made since Harmon started banging on the door, and we were wasting time.

  "OK, Harmon. Now you've got a reason to work with me here. You gotta get to the hospital, my partner has to get to the hospital," I said. "You tell me how to call back your helicopter pilot and all three of us fly out together."

  He looked up and saw me pointing the gun in his face and thought about the alternatives for less than ten seconds.

  "Out in my bag on the deck there's a satellite phone. Pilot's on the same frequency. Get me up out of here and get the phone. I'll make the call."

  I had to give him credit; he was still working the advantages for himself, slim as they were.

  "No, I'll get the gun out of your pocket. Then we'll get you up," I said.

  With the doorway jammed, I knew the only way to get outside now was through the hatch. I figured I'd have to get him up and tied securely to a stanchion before I could climb down and get to the phone. Then I'd be calling Billy. His pilot's job was over. I circled him again, kept the MK in my hand, and then knelt down.

  "I'm going to reach down into your pocket, Harmon. You move, I'll put a round through the back of your head. It won't make a difference to me. You're out of my way regardless."

  I went down on the floor behind him, my face next to his back, and I could see the stain of blood spreading down the side of his pants where I'd shot him. I was hoping that I hadn't hit the femoral artery, but the bleeding was already extensive enough that droplets were falling into the water below.

  I extended my arm down and with a little trouble found the pocket opening and reached inside to touch the hard metal of a short-barreled pistol. I came up with a new-looking Colt revolver and slid it across the floor toward Sherry's cot.

  "All right, Harmon," I said, standing. "Now I'm going to get you under the arms here and lift you up. From the looks of it you're gonna bleed out if I don't get you out of there now and get a patch on that wound. So don't fuck with me. I'm the only one left here to save your ass."

  He grunted once and then said: "You think I'm afraid of you, Freeman? Don't flatter yourself."

  "No. I doubt you're afraid of anything," I said and meant it.

  First I put the MK in the waistband at the small of my back and then bent behind him, got him under both armpits and started to lift. He seemed surprisingly light at first, and I had his rump almost over the edge of the hatch when he suddenly got heavy and his eyes got suddenly big and the man who feared nothing started to scream. They call them prehistoric, the alligators of Florida. And they have survived so many thousands of years because they are nature's superior predators in their world. Their jaw muscles are machine strong when they are biting down and weaker but much quicker when they are opening the mouth. It's the quickness that's astonishing.

  The first yank pulled Harmon back down through the hole and I almost followed him. Over his shoulder I could see one black eye, like a shiny marble, mounted on the rumpled, gray-green snout. Unemotional, limbic, it stared up at me with no recognition that a man's leg from the knee down was in its mouth. The other eye was missing, the socket where it should have been was a bloody hole, as if it had been drilled or merely gouged out by the shaft of a sheared-off golf club. Then like a whiplash the gator flashed its tail and threw its thousand- pound body into an S shape and Harmon went down through the hole like he'd been flushed. I heard the crack of bone and snap of ligament over the man's deep-throated scream and tumbled back, landing on my ass. I scrambled back to the edge only in time to see that classic roll of the big reptile's spin, showing its light-colored belly and black, mottled back as it pulled its prey down under the water where it cannot breathe and will soon give up. It is all very natural. And nature is sometimes a terrible thing to watch.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  They were all dead. Arms folded at impossible angles. Clothing unnaturally empty and stained in dark amber colors that they never would have worn for themselves. Human bodies are diminished by death. In a movie some alien called us bags of water and in death our life leaks out.

  I stepped around Marcus, let my eyes skim over the head wound but they stopped on the outstretched hand, the missing fingers I was responsible for. I moved on to a jump bag, one I hadn't seen before and assumed was Harmon's. Inside I found the phone he'd spoken of before the gator took him away in pieces. I turned it on and dialed Billy Manchester's number. He would be the one person I knew would have the technological ability to take the call even if the power and the cell towers were down in West Palm Beach. He was my friend, my attorney, and since I often worked for him as a private investigator, he was also my boss. He listened as always in absorbed silence until I was done describing where Sherry and I were and the GPS coordinates, her medical condition, and a quick synopsis of the carnage lying around me.

  "I will be on a med flight in thirty minutes, Max, with a crew and an evacuation basket," Billy said. "I will also inform the Broward sheriff's office of the situation. Are you OK?"

  "Yeah, Billy. Just get here."

  I punched the off button and stepped out past the hand with one thumb. Buck was facedown, the ripped left leg of his jeans was empty. Farther along the deck was the body of a big man I did not recognize. As I walked around him, I glimpsed a clump of bloodstained gristle against the nearby wall that I barely recognized as an ear. At the corner was Wayne, lying on his side, his arm extended out in the direction of his friend as if offering the four fingers he had left from an accident long ago to match his partner's lonely thumb.

  The sun was partway up now, smoldering behind an overcast sky, dimly glowing. A humid wind stirred and blew through the broken Glades trees and ferns, momentarily sweeping away the stink of blood and cordite and humans. Sometimes nature cannot stand us. And sometimes we cannot stand our own nature. I carefully made my way back inside to Sherry's side and waited for the sound of a rescue.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  As always the author would like to acknowledge the excellent work of the folks at Dutton, especially Mitch Hoffman and Erika Imranyi, who succinctly debunk the statement that editors don't edit anymore.

  I also wish to thank Philip Spitzer without whom there would be no Max; my early reader, Lillian Ros Martin, for her insight and Spanish lessons; and Joanne Sinchuk, who spreads our work and without whom so many Florida mystery writers would simply be broke.

  EPILOGUE

  We are through the hurricane season. It is January in South Florida and the tourists and winter residents are leaking back down from up north to seek out the sun now that it is safe and the chill of winter is pushing them out of their own homes. It is nice to avoid the inconveniences of nature if you can afford to.

  I am avoiding them myself by spending most of my time at Sherry's home in Fort Lauderdale. After she was released from the hospital, I built a ramp from her driveway up onto her back deck, which overlooks the pool. I installed a new set of stainless steel handles that let her ease herself down into the water, and although that was their immediate purpose, she has taken to using them for doing "dips." It is an excruciatingly difficult exercise she learned in rehab that is like an inverted pull-up and works the hell out of one's shoulder and triceps muscles. I've tried to match her repetitions and failed. She calls me a wimp but concedes that she is only pressing the weight of her body minus one leg. I kept telling myself I was there to help her but I have not yet returned to my river shack. I think perhaps I'm there to help myself. Being alone in the wilderness has lost some
appeal. Being with someone you need and needs you is, well, natural.

  When Billy's privately arranged medevac helicopter arrived at the Everglades shack, a rescue jumper and an emergency medical physician winched down and immediately took control of Sherry, inserting IVs, stabilizing her leg, administering who knows what antishock drugs. They strapped her into the basket and pulled her up into the chopper and I followed. While they worked on her, a flight nurse was trying to open another vein in Sherry's right arm but had to pry her hand open to loosen a muscle, and in her palm she found a necklace with two stones, an opal and a diamond. Sherry had not let loose of it since ripping it off Wayne's neck. The nurse handed it to me and I put it in my pocket. The flight back to West Boca Medical Center took such little time it caught me off guard. We had been so close the whole time, barely twenty miles away.

  I was kept in another room of the emergency center, treated for cuts and abrasions to my face and hands, and proved to be an uncooperative patient until Sherry's doctor checked back with me to update me on her condition. She would recover, he said, after the amputation of her infected leg. Later, when she was lucid, I stood by her hospital bed and then laid my head on her chest, listening to her heart and promising that we would do together whatever it took to make her whole again.

  Billy, the stoic and always-in-control attorney, left the room and I suspect he used one of those silk handkerchiefs he always carried in his suit pockets to dry his tears. When he'd arrived in the helicopter he had deferred to the others and stayed up in the aircraft. Later he told me that he had taken several digital photographs of the area, including shots of the four bodies and their positions on the outside deck. The Broward sheriff's office homicide unit would take over the investigation with interagency help from the Department of Natural Resources and the Palm Beach and Collier County sheriffs. The illegal drilling exploration station would of course be exposed.

  Billy made sure his photographs got to the right reporters at the right newspapers. The environmental folks took the fuel and ran with it, demanding that the state's attorney general get involved in an investigation of other possible operations. In time the equipment and computer files at the station were confiscated and tracked directly to GULFLO.

  The oil company of course would be publicly stunned that, due to the misreading of a survey map, they had made a mistake in operating the research station in an area off limits to such work. They would also disavow any knowledge of a "so-called" security team. They paid a fine. They were sorry But Billy had kept his feelers out, investigating on his own the identities of Harmon and Squires and although Squires's portfolio remained thin and scattered, Billy would eventually flag an obscure civil suit brought by a woman in Coral Springs who claimed to be Harmon's wife, which she had filed against GULFLO. The suit was asking for five million in compensatory damages for wrongful death. Billy was watching to see how long it would stay on the docket before being settled out of court.

  Billy had often schooled me on the past and present way things work in Florida; two centuries of people flowing to the sunshine had brought with it the spoiling of big business, corruption, money, and crime.

  "Nature knocks it back every once in a while, Max," Billy said. "But the nature of men, I'm afraid, will always prevail."

  I did not believe I'd gained much insight into the ways of nature or the nature of man. The bodies of the boys would be returned to their mothers, and Buck Morris would be buried alone in a pauper's grave.

  Sherry and I would recount to the homicide detectives our days since the hurricane struck in as much detail as possible, as many names as we could, estimated times, conversations as close as we could recall, number of shots fired. The days we spent at the Snows' fishing camp leading up to that night, we kept to ourselves.

  After she was home, when it seemed right, I tried to return her necklace. I held it out in my hand, the chain still broken. She stared at it for a time then asked me for a tiny wooden box from her dresser top. She placed the necklace inside and then tucked it deep into a bottom drawer she used only for keepsakes and memories.

  For now she swims. She is researching prostheses and has already subscribed to a Web site detailing the training involved in wheelchair marathons. The park ranger checks my cabin regularly and said its traditional Dade County pine construction weathered the hurricane with nary a damaged stairstep or busted window. When he asked when I planned to return, I had no answer.

  How about, I said, we let it take its course.

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